


not a matter of if, but when

by birdcagereligion (ckasjfbfksbj)



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Gen, its real sad boy hours up in here, seth is a thot and you wont change my mind, vanessa deserved better and this is the hill i shall die on
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-05
Updated: 2020-02-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:00:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22570633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ckasjfbfksbj/pseuds/birdcagereligion
Summary: Years ago, he had seen this documentary on the nature channel about these two bucks some hunters had found in the woods who’d locked antlers while fighting and died right there, stuck together, a monument to arrogance and pride. The boys were like those bucks, and they would keep struggling until they both died unless Eddie did something about it. So he did.
Relationships: Eddie Cruickshank & Sonja Lam, Eddie Cruickshank & Vanessa Styles
Comments: 1
Kudos: 10





	not a matter of if, but when

**Author's Note:**

> unbeta'd so any mistakes are mine

Seth was 14 when he brought the first girl home to meet Eddie. Her name was Victoria, _not Vicky_ , and she had the sort of warm, kind blue eyes that made you feel like you were standing in the ocean on a particularly beautiful day, like nothing else mattered except you and the water and the sun on your skin.

Victoria was a decent kid, had a good head on her shoulders and every time she would come over she made it a point to ask Eddie about his day, she would sit and listen to him ramble about a particularly rough customer or what he was making for dinner. She’d even help him cook sometimes, not that he needed it, but it was nice to have help around the kitchen. 

Eddie knew that Seth was gonna break her heart someday. It wouldn’t be on purpose, he wouldn’t mean to do it and even if he did he wouldn’t admit it. She was like a balloon who’d fallen into the middle of a bramble patch, there was no way she’d get out of this unscathed, no matter how it happened. But still, Eddie liked her and he hoped that she would stick around for a while.

Except, Richie didn’t like Victoria. He didn’t say anything, not out loud at least, but more than once Eddie had caught him doing that thing where his eyes would go cold and calculating and he would look at someone like he didn’t see a person, he saw a sack of flesh and bone, something to take apart just to see how it worked. Ray had made a joke once when Richie was still a toddler and they had caught him cornering one of the neighbor’s cats in the backyard with that same look in his eye, _that boys got a little Bundy in him._ Eddie prayed every damn night that Ray didn’t end up being right.

Seth broke Victoria’s heart less than a month after he brought her home to meet Eddie. Swore up and down it had nothing to do with his brother, they were just going in different directions in life, but Eddie wasn’t an idiot, he knew that it didn’t matter if Seth was sure he’d met his damn soulmate, if Richie didn’t like her then it would be out the door with her. They were a package deal, always would be and unless the dame understood that she would never last.

After that, it was Nancy with the too-bright smile and long dark hair who lasted less than a week after Richie whispered something to her during dinner that made her excuse herself from the table and never return. Then it was Maxine who always looked angry, like she was just waiting for a fight. She lasted the longest, 3 whole months. Seth broke up with her for Amanda with the bleach blonde hair who was always popping her gum. She lasted a little over a month, until Richie put gum in her hair one night when she’d fallen asleep with Seth on the couch watching a movie. If Seth didn’t get around to it, Richie always drove them away.

See, what those girls didn’t seem to understand, what it took Eddie years to, was that Seth was like the house from Poltergeist and Richie was the ancient burial ground he was built on. Anyone who dared to get too close, who tried to make their home in him, they would have to deal with whispers from the TV static and trees coming to life and corpses in the swimming pool. Anyone who tried to come between them Richie would drive utterly fucking insane. No amount of sage would cleanse Seth, because his haunting was a willing one.

At first, he tried to warn the girls but they never listened. They would just nod and smile and tell him not to worry about them. But he still did, each and every balloon girl that Seth brought into their bramble patch. Be it his or Richies thorns that popped them, it was always Eddie who had to sweep up the pieces, field every sobbing phone call and drive them home when they showed up on the doorstep. After a while, he stopped trying to warn them, stopped letting himself get attached. He made it a rule that he wouldn’t let himself warn them anymore, not when the girls didn’t listen anyway, there was no point after all.

Eventually, Eddie stopped keeping track of them, stopped remembering the names and the faces, only small things stuck unbidden to his memory. One of them always wore too much rose-scented perfume. One always wore colors so bright they should have been considered a crime against humanity. Even then, they started to blend together, a new face every other week. He was getting old, he couldn’t keep up.

After the boys moved out, well Seth just stopped bringing them home to meet him at all. No use trucking the fling of the week across the country when they all knew she wouldn’t last. Richie would give him snarky updates over the phone, to keep him in the loop. _This one’s name is Tara and she has angel wings tattoed on her back. This one’s name is Chelsea and she steals all my smokes. This one’s name is Vanessa, I hope she sticks around for a while._

Eddie thought that she must be special. She was the first one Richie didn’t have a single complaint about, not one snide comment or sarcastic remark. He even complimented her on more than one occasion, _the job she planned went off without a hitch, I couldn’t have done it better myself. She gives us both a run for our money. You’d like her._

Then Seth came home with her, gleefully showing Eddie their rings, and he _knew_ she was special. Vanessa Styles, _I already let him tie me down with a ring I wasn’t about to let him take my name too_ , was a goddamn spitfire. Richie hadn’t been exaggerating when he said that she gave them a run for their money. She could take anything they gave her and spin it back on them tenfold. She had a mouth on her that would put a sailor to shame and she carried herself the way only broken people who’d been forced to piece themselves back together do, with a too straight spine and eyes that were hard beneath the surface.

Eddie decided that for her he would break his rule. He tried to warn her, tried to tell her about the house and the ghosts and what laid in wait for her, but she just laughed and smiled at him. _I know what those boys are about, why do you think I married one of them?_

That was when he first noticed the darkness behind her eyes and he realized that she too was haunted, by what he didn’t and never would know, but she had learned how to tame the ghosts inside of her somehow and that fact gave him solace. Maybe she could be the one to teach Seth how to deal with his own ghosts the way Eddie had never been able to.

A few months later, Richie called him up to let him know that Vanessa had finally had her fill of them and served Seth the papers. A few weeks after that, Richie and Seth got into a big fight, one of their worst, and Seth ran off. Pulled a sloppy job on Big Jim and got himself caught, sent down for a dime. It was one of his dumber moves, but Eddie didn’t fault him for it. He’d been dreaming about pulling the same job for almost twenty years, he just wasn’t dumb enough to actually do it. Big Jim might have been a raging asshole, but the man always had a good score ripe for the taking, and it wasn’t like he’d kicked Eddie out of Houston too.

Richie went full-on Looney Tunes when Seth got sent down, squirreled himself away in a shack in the woods and embraced his inner Robinson Crusoe. Eddie and Vanessa both tried to pull him out of it, but it was no use. He was a ghost with no house to haunt, wandering aimlessly trying to find a new place where he could slam the cupboards and rattle chains in the attic. 

Vanessa still called and visited, and that first year on Seth’s birthday she showed up on his doorstep with bags full of groceries and tears in her eyes. Together they baked a carrot cake from scratch, with real cream cheese frosting. They sat side by side at the kitchen table and blew out the candles. _Only nine to go._ She said as she left that night, a smile on her face. _That ain’t so long._

The next year, when Vanessa showed up Eddie was surprised. He was sure that she would have moved on by then, ten years was a long time to wait for someone, but there she was, standing on his doorstep with bags of groceries and a bright smile on her face. That night after they had finished what they could of the cake and Vanessa was on her way out the door, she leaned up and pressed a soft kiss against his cheek. _Only eight more to go old man. Do you think you can make it?_

The next year, when Vanessa showed up Eddie already had the mixing bowls out on the counter. _Only seven more._ She said after they blew out the candles. _That ain’t so bad._ But she didn’t sound sure, her voice wavered. _Right?_

The next year, Eddie went to her. He’d been in her neck of the woods searching out some intel and figured it was his turn to show up at her place. She answered the door with a warm smile, like she’d been expecting him. The cake is already baked, just waiting for him to arrive so they could blow out the candles. _Only six years left._ She said that night as she walked him to his car. _Almost halfway there._

The last year, when Vanessa showed up she had a smile on her face and what she had considered good news. _We got a plan, one last job with a 30mil payout, then we’re gonna get out._ He’d heard that line so many times over his years in the business that he had to stop himself from laughing in her face when she said it, so damn sure of herself. Nobody ever got out, not for good, not even him. Sure he didn’t work the field anymore, but he was still in the business, just on the other side of the table. He bought and sold information, he planned jobs and he ran them, all from the comfort of his favorite chair. But he hadn’t gotten out, probably never would.

The next he heard about that so-called Perfect Job was when an old buddy of his called him up to let him know that the boys had been spotted in Texas, both of them, and some dame had gotten herself caught up between them. Held a cop at gunpoint so Seth could turn tail and run. Got caught with 4mil in bearer bonds. The list kept growing. _Two dimes,_ his buddy said, _poor girl didn’t know what she was getting into when she married a Gecko, did she?_ But she did, she had always known, even when Eddie had tried to warn her she had just smiled and laughed and brushed him off. She had seen those boys as clearly as he did, down into the dark and rotten core of them, and she had seen the tiny spark of light that was there and she had latched onto it. Thought as foolishly as he had that she could nurture it, could make it shimmer and gleam again, that she could make those boys better. Maybe this had finally taught her the same lesson Eddie himself had been forced to learn years and years ago, that sometimes a spark is just a spark, and no amount of care is gonna make it grow, the only thing you can do is keep it from going out.

He still wrote to her and she wrote him back. Apologized for not listening and for falling for Seth’s bullshit yet again. _I’m not anyone’s second choice, it only took fucking up my life to make me realize that._ A few times he even made the drive out to Hilltop and visited her.

Eddie saw neither hide nor hair of the boys after that, didn’t hear from them, not a phone call or a letter, not until one day when he turned on the news and there they were, dead in a fiery car crash. He didn’t tell Vanessa but she found out anyway, asked him to bake a cake for them in her honor.

A few weeks after he buried the boys, Richie showed up on his doorstep, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and very much not dead, begging for his help on a job. Eddie gave in eventually like he always would. He could never deny those boys anything.

Not long after that, Seth showed up too. Except he wasn’t alone. He’d brought the flavor of the week with him and when Eddie first set eyes on her his heart broke all over again. Sonja with the sly grin and hard eyes, Sonja who could take it as good as she got. Might as well have been a damn clone of Vanessa with all the similarities Eddie noticed within the first ten minutes of knowing her. Later that night, when Sonja had left the room, Eddie turned to Seth and asked him in a voice he tried to not make bitter, _You sure know how to pick ‘em, don’t you?_

Once again, Eddie broke his rule for one of Seth’s girls. He told Sonja about Vanessa, about what the boys do, how they take anything bright and shining and rub at it until it’s just as dark and dull as them. He told her about the ghosts and the house and all of the balloon girls whose pieces he still sometimes found floating around in his mind. But she didn’t listen. Smiled at him and laughed, the same way Vanessa had, _Don’t worry about me old man, I know what I’m doing._

Then there’s the job, Eddie’s swan song, his only chance at being one of the few people who got out of the business alive. But the boy’s can’t handle anything not being about them, and they fall back into the same rabbit hole Eddie had been digging them out of for most of their lives. Years ago, he had seen this documentary on the nature channel about these two bucks in the woods who’d locked antlers while fighting and died right there, stuck together, a monument to arrogance and pride. The boys were like those bucks, and they would keep struggling until they both died unless Eddie did something about it. So he did.

He tried to get through to them, he tried with everything he had. But they never listened, they never had and never would. They were selfish through and through, always had been, even as kids. The only thing they cared about more than themselves was each other, so he had used that fact to his advantage more times than he could remember.

Its when they finally started to see sense that the shit royally hit the fan, faster than it ever had before. In the span of a few minutes Eddie learned why Richie and Seth had gone their separate ways, what exactly had found them in Mexico, and that goddamn monsters were real. Seth had been right to tell him that this world wasn’t his anymore, that he should hang up his wingtips and run for the hills, away from them and the dark things made flesh before him. But he was never one to give up, never one to run. That time was no different. Eddie decided in a split second that if he was gonna die, it would be on his own terms, it would be for his family. The monster threw him aside like he was a rag doll and not a fully grown man who’d been putting on weight in his age, and Eddie landed on a sharp piece of metal he’d been meaning to get around to picking up. The monster crumbled to dust before them, he would have laughed if not for the blood slowly filling his lungs.

As Eddie sat there, bleeding out, using his last few precious breathes to comfort the boy’s he’d taken into his home all those years ago, who’d been more like sons to him than they would ever know, his thoughts slipped unbidden to Vanessa and the box of red velvet cake mix in his cupboard that would never see the light of day.

_You gotta take care of each other,_ Eddie said with his last breath. And that was his legacy, the one thing he had tried to teach those boys, the one thing he did teach them, the most important thing of all.

-

Miles and miles away in her cell at Hilltop, not even a full year into her sentence, Vanessa sits alone on her bed and watches the mail cart pass her by yet again. It had been over a month since Eddie had sent her a letter and when she tried to call him the number was disconnected. But she wasn’t concerned, he was getting forgetful in his age, and it was honestly a miracle that he was still talking to her at all. She’d expected him to forget her the same way the boys did, but he didn’t. He’d sent her letters and answered her calls and even visited a few times. He’d promised her that he would never forget, and he was a man of his word.

So she waits. He’d write to her when he found the time, she was sure of it.


End file.
